Love and War

By Linda Hanley Finigan

An Indie Reader Discovery Award finalist, LOVE AND WAR spans the 1960s through the lives of Molly Drayton, an antiwar activist whose father becomes under secretary of Defense, and Jack Masterson, a Marine suffering the scars of Vietnam.

Set against the backdrop of that tumultuous decade—the music, the protests, the culture, the unraveling— LOVE AND WAR is a coming of age novel, a love story and a war story, a road trip across America in a troubled time whose politics and passions continue to haunt our own.

In a four star review, Indie Reader says: "(LOVE AND WAR).. reads like a hybrid of "The Things They Carried", and director Julie Taymor's visual extravaganza "Across the Universe."

The Durham Herald writes: "If you lived through that decade, or are just fascinated with the historical period, …Linda Hanley Finigan's novel LOVE AND WAR offers a ride you will willingly want to take from the opening pages."

Molly Drayton, the idealistic daughter of Republican parents, is twelve years old when she tells JFK that she loves him at a New York campaign stop in 1960. Across the country, thirteen year-old Jack Masterson and his widowed mother are leaving Ohio for a new life in California.

In alternating chapters, Molly and Jack journey toward their eventual meeting in 1970, a parallel narrative through the counter-culture wars at home and the battlefields of Vietnam.

When a chance meeting brings them together, they embark on a cross-country road trip and a volatile love affair, both fleeing the dissolution of the world they knew. Jack is a shattered veteran of the war. Estranged from her powerful family, disillusioned by the violent collapse of the protest movement, Molly hopes her love will free them.

"Finigan's light touch saves the book from becoming simply yet another book about the 1960s," Indie Reader's reviewer writes. "…LOVE AND WAR is a worthy choice for anyone who understands how loving someone can be both a miraculous and painful choice."

• Language: English
• Publisher: BookBaby
• Release date: Oct 15, 2013
• ISBN: 9780982904367

Book preview

Copyright © 2013 by Linda Hanley Finigan

All rights reserved. Except for reviews, no portion of this work may be reproduced in any medium without written permission of the publisher.

ISBN 978-0-9829043-6-7

Grateful acknowledgment for use of the following lyrics: Eve of Destruction Words and Music by P.F. Sloan and Steve Barri. Copyright © 1965 UNIVERSAL MUSIC CORP. Copyright Renewed. All Rights Reserved. Used by Permission. Reprinted by permission of Hal Leonard Corporation.

Help Me Rhonda Words and Music by Brian Wilson and Mike Love. Copyright © 1965 IRVING MUSIC, INC. Copyright Renewed. All Rights Reserved. Used by Permission. Reprinted by permission of Hal Leonard Corporation.

Heatwave (Love Is Like A Heatwave) Words and Music by Edward Holland, Lamont Dozier and Brian Holland. © 1963 (Renewed 1991) JOBETE MUSIC CO., INC. All Rights Controlled and Administered by EMI BLACKWOOD MUSIC INC. on behalf of STONE AGATE MUSIC (A Division of JOBETE MUSIC CO., INC.) All Rights Reserved. International Copyright Secured. Used by Permission. Reprinted by permission of Hal Leonard Corporation.

cover design: Linda Hanley Finigan, based on a photograph

©iStockphoto.com/Kevin Lange

interior images: courtesy National Archives; ©iStockphoto.com/SoleilC author photo: © Nubar Alexanian

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Cobalt House, LLC

PO Box 52574 . Durham, NC 27717-2574

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Every emancipation has in it the seeds of a new slavery,

and every truth easily becomes a lie.

I.F. Stone

If any question why we died,

Tell them, because our fathers lied.

Epitaphs of War, Rudyard Kipling 1914-1918

april 1970

Soon it will be dark and then what will she do? A woman alone, hitching at nightfall, waiting with her thumb extended like a target by the side of the road. She keeps walking, head down, thumb out, tears rolling down her cheeks, willing someone to stop. At first she expected another woman would. A female trucker had given her a ride this far, Taos to Flagstaff, but now as night falls, women speed by without a glance. Cross-country buses blaze past practically knocking her sideways.

She’d made a mistake heading west. Who did she know in San Francisco? Where could she go with fifty dollars in her pocket, the clothes on her back? In Taos that morning, the police were coming and she’d panicked. Now, she’d had all day staring out the passenger window of an eighteen-wheeler to realize she had to go back east. Where else could she go but back to the place where she started?

The sun sinks beneath the mountains as a car approaches from the opposite direction, headlights blinding. She looks up as it barrels past. A woman’s face much like her own watches from the passenger seat, a man beside her driving. It’s all she can see before the sedan disappears in the distance.

A quick glimpse of the future, or a vision of time moving backwards—

The week before he was elected President, John F. Kennedy shook her hand. Of course he’d shaken hands with hundreds of people, thousands even, those last frantic days before the election, but theirs was a special moment unlike the others. Molly Drayton knew this because she had relived that encounter in her mind each of the eighty-two days and nights between then and now, January 20, 1961.

Inauguration day.

Kennedy’s campaign handshake had become her lucky stone, a memory to replay each night before falling asleep, sifting the event for future significance. JFK’s handsome face gazing down at hers, the feel of his palm, cool to the touch; his hair beneath the streetlight, not the plain color she’d expected from photos, but a fiery auburn a little like her own. True, hers was mostly brown. But a little bit red. In a certain light. Besides, that wasn’t the important part.

John F. Kennedy shook her hand.

He spoke to her.

That inaugural morning, Molly lay in bed propped against pillows, feverish with flu, watching the event on television, which was another gift of fate. She wasn’t in school, but home sick in bed, witnessing history unfold in black and white on the little TV set she and Ida had spirited upstairs from the den.

The new President’s words arrived as though in a dream, his clipped Boston accent recalling summers at her grandfather’s on Nantucket; the words like poetry even then, although Molly did not linger on their meaning. What moved her was the sound of his voice, the lilting phrases interlocking one with another. Bear any burden. Pay any price.

Already his face bore a hint of the icon it would become. The shock of hair strictly parted, head poised at an angle, index finger jabbing the air, long Boston vowels ricocheting off the marble steps beneath the majestic dome. A devoted disciple of My Weekly Reader, Molly was newly passionate about history, and her encounter with JFK thrilled her with its connection to something worthy and large.

Beyond her bedroom window snowdrifts rolled across the Great Neck lawn, and this too was another magical bond between them. The very same storm had greeted Kennedy that day in Washington.

Don’t that Eisenhower look like an old man? Ida Fields flicked her feather duster across Ike’s face on the screen. Don’t we need some young blood down there in Washington, baby?

Molly caught a whiff of the housekeeper’s fragrance, a scent of Lemon Pledge and Jergens Lotion, sweeter than her mother’s French perfume. You dozing off again, babylamb, but you best keep those eyes open. One day you be proud to tell your grandkids you was watching this moment when it happened. Watching on the teevee.

Molly cracked open an eye to see Ida’s strong back hunched in her rocking chair before the flickering screen. I’m awake, she said.

Working alone in the kitchen, Ida usually wore a plain bandanna around her hair, but today she’d knotted a colorful kerchief into a bow. She wore her frilly red apron, the one she reserved for special occasions. Molly thought of Ida like a grandmother, though the truth was she was closer in age to Molly’s mother who that very weekend had turned forty.

You look pretty, Molly said.

I’m gussied up for Mr. President Kennedy. Ida turned from the screen and smiled. Do you think he’ll notice?

Molly laughed. He can’t see you.

Ida snapped her dust rag against Molly’s toes beneath the quilt. I know he can’t see me, baby doll. I see me.

Molly asked, Do you think I should wear my new pajamas? The silky pair she’d gotten for Christmas instead of the old blue flannel ones she’d been wearing now for two days.

You’s fine. Ida turned back to the TV.

Molly knew that had her mother been home, instead of celebrating her birthday on St. Thomas, she would never have been permitted the luxury of watching television for hours. Abigail Drayton would have considered that expenditure of time inexcusable.

Ike and Mamie flashed across the little screen, beautiful smiling Jackie seated beside the old President. The contrast! How could her parents not see? Kennedy was the wide-open future, not an old relic like General Eisenhower. Or Nixon, the outgoing Vice-President, with his creepy smirk that made her flesh crawl.

The promise in Jackie’s proud smile, her sharp angular beauty, at once haughty and worshipful. Eisenhower sat beside her, bundled in an overcoat, the thick white scarf wrapped round his neck giving him the look of an ancient prizefighter. Mamie wore a stupid veiled thing that flapped across her forehead in the breeze. She had to hold her silly hat down with one gloved hand so it wouldn’t fly away. Hatless and coatless in the bitter cold, JFK arrived like a messenger from another planet, a marker between everything that had gone before and now.

Bathed in the glow of the televised inaugural, even Molly’s childhood bedroom seemed transformed. Her favorite horse pictures on the wall, her ballerina music box and plastic troll collection, her princess phone, all her treasures dimming now in significance. He spoke to her. The torch had been passed to a new generation, and she was part of it.

Now Jackie Kennedy, she’s a white lady got class. Ida nodded approvingly as the new First Lady’s features filled the screen.

For months, Molly and Ida had pored over LIFE magazines as soon as they arrived, vying with each other to get first look at each new installment in veneration of the clan. All the beautiful smiling Kennedys arranged around the sofa in Hyannisport the morning after the election, the handsome dead brother, the tragic sisters, touch football on the lawn. By inaugural day, those LIFE magazines had been adored so frequently that in a certain light, each glossy page bore a thin coating of fingerprints.

Across the room, the new first couple shook hands all around as they left the Capitol in the open-air limousine that would carry them down Pennsylvania Avenue. Molly dozed again. When she awoke, Ida had gone downstairs and the parade had started. Rows of Marines marched in formation to John Philip Sousa, followed by a close shot of the President and his wife whispering to each other behind the glass-enclosed warmth of the viewing stand. Jackie was seated, a fur muff on her lap, her upturned face serene, radiant. The President leaned over. It looked for a moment as if they might kiss, but then the picture was gone, replaced by a commercial.

Ida stood in the doorway. Too bad your Daddy ain’t a Democrat.

Molly groaned. Please don’t rub it in.

Vice-President of a defense firm on Long Island, Molly’s father conferred regularly with generals and congressmen, although with a new administration in office, she suspected he wouldn’t be doing that any more.

If your Daddy was a Democrat, I bet he’d be getting a job down there in Washington with Mr. President Kennedy himself. We all might be on our way to live someplace else. Ida shook her head. Instead, I’m on my way down to the kitchen. You want baked potato or mashed with your dinner, baby?

Molly slid lower into the bed.

Honey, I said baked potato or mashed?

What she really wanted, what would make her feel better, if anything could, was a hot fudge sundae. Molly had two dollars left from her Christmas money and if the roads weren’t so bad, she might have tried to persuade Ida to call her son Eli to drive them to Carvel, but she knew that wasn’t going to happen.

I don’t care, I’m not hungry.

You just star struck, is all you is. Ida laughed, her voice trailing behind her down the hall.

Once she’d gone, Molly flipped over, burying her head in the pillows, her magical sense of connection to the day’s events already fading. Even the televised image switched from live coverage of the parade itself to a boring studio commentary by Howard K. Smith.

Molly closed her eyes, drifting back to the memory she hadn’t tired of all these weeks later—the fall evening just days before the election, when time stood still and her life intersected with his.

As soon as she’d spotted the campaign motorcade route printed in Newsday, Molly had lost no time begging Zed Pierce to take her. A handyman around the house, Zed occasionally chauffeured her father to the airport or the city. Tall and gaunt with his hair brushed back in a greaser’s pompadour, he lived alone in the caretaker’s apartment above the garage.

He looked a little like one of the popular boys on American Bandstand, not exactly good-looking but a really great dancer. She didn’t know how old he was, maybe in his late twenties. Molly barely ever spoke to him. Making her way up the garage stairs, she steeled herself to be fearless. Profiles in Courage!

Would you do me a favor? she asked from the doorway. The late October weather was unseasonably warm, an Indian summer evening, and Zed had the door to his kitchen open. Molly had dressed for the occasion with care, choosing her favorite plaid skirt and cardigan, giving one hundred strokes to her chestnut hair, which she wore pinned back from her freckled face with a barrette. She wished now she’d taken the extra step of putting shiny new pennies in the slots of her Cordovan loafers, which some of the upperclassmen did for good luck. Tonight she was sure she must look at least fourteen, though Zed probably knew she wasn’t.

He looked up from his magazine. What kind of favor?

I wonder if you’d drive me somewhere.

What, to a party?

Molly shook her head.

Shopping?

I want you to drive me to see Kennedy’s motorcade on Hempstead Turnpike. Will you do that?

She couldn’t believe it when he said yes.

An hour later, they rode side by side in his beat-up old Dodge that smelled of gasoline and cigarettes. Before they even left the driveway, Zed stopped to fiddle with the radio, switching it to WNEW, her father’s station. Molly knew then he must be older than he looked. She had asked for the favor, and as a girl who’d been brought up exceedingly well, Molly understood whose responsibility it was to make conversation. She turned and asked, What kind of name is Zed?

It’s short, he said.

For what?

Zedediah. My old lady got it from the Bible.

I don’t know where my parents got my name from, she said. It’s really Margrette Ellen.

I know that. Zed lit a Chesterfield, exhaling smoke from the corners of his mouth. "So tell me, Margaret Ellen, because I’d really like to know. What’s so great about Jack Kennedy?"

Molly stared at her hands. I don’t know. He’s neat.

He’s neat! I hope you know he’s just as shady as the next guy running for office. You know that, right? The only difference is Kennedy happens to be rich, and his Daddy’s buying him an election.

Zed glanced over, taking his eyes from the road. Okay. He’s good looking. Is that it? That’s why you like him?

No, Molly protested. He’s young and he’s smart and he has ideals.

Zed fixed her with a withering glance. Ideals.

No, I mean it.

He laughed. I bet you do.

He parked the Dodge several blocks away on a side street and Molly tagged along behind him in silence. Zed marched straight ahead, not looking back, his hands shoved into his pockets, another cigarette dangling from his lips.

Streams of people lugging picnic coolers and lawn chairs filled the sidewalks. Nearing the parade route, even the air seemed different, carrying the charge of the crowd. Young children waved homemade banners; two little girls ran along the curb unfurling a tattered bed sheet on which they had lettered in red, MASSAPEQUA LOVES YOU, JFK!!

An excited tide was sweeping them all toward the motorcade route. Zed flashed her a smile. You bring any signs with you, Margaret Ellen?

I wish I had! It hadn’t even occurred to Molly to make a sign. If she were carrying a sign, Kennedy might actually notice her. He might tell the driver to stop while he singled her out from the crowd.

She wished now she’d asked for a ride to the rally itself. The motorcade would swoop past in a second. When she glanced up at Zed, he laughed and flicked his cigarette into the gutter.

From far down the avenue, Molly caught the first distant strains of a marching band, a bouncy drum roll followed by a blast of off-key trumpets. He’s coming!

Good. Zed looked at his watch. You’ve got twenty minutes.

Molly turned back to the crowd. Parents craned their necks, hoisting children onto shoulders, everyone angling to get a better view of the approaching band. Two blue and orange Nassau County patrol cars sealed off another section of side streets, taking up position at either curb. The band drew closer, the steady drum cadence carried on the wind before easing into a jazzy introduction to Happy Days are Here Again.

It was all Molly could do to stay rooted in place, to keep from dashing out to join the parade. All her life, she had loved the sound of a marching band: Memorial Day, Fourth of July, the St. Patrick’s Day parade viewed from the Manhattan office of her father’s attorney. When Molly was younger, she had dreamed of becoming a majorette, practicing in front of her bedroom mirror with a long ruler in place of a baton.

Her mother, not surprisingly, considered that plan inappropriate. A marching band! St. Andrew’s doesn’t even have football, much less a marching band. The idea!

A dozen teenage girls came trotting into view, lifting their long legs in time with the music. They wore short pleated blue skirts, knee socks and candy stripe jackets beneath straw hats with blue KENNEDY headbands.

The cheerleaders fanned out across all four lanes, executing a rolling series of cartwheels, their skimpy blue skirts flying up to reveal red panties. The crowd applauded heartily and Molly was mortified to hear Zed whistling, too.

Give me a K! the girls shouted in unison as they landed on their feet.

K!

Give me an E!

E! Molly volleyed back each letter in turn, giddy with excitement.

Give me a Y! What’s that spell?

KENNEDY!

"What’s that spell?"

Souvenir vendors hawking miniature flags and Jack and Jackie photo pins crisscrossed the empty asphalt as the cheerleaders moved on. The band switched to Kennedy’s own theme, High Hopes, the trumpets straying happily off key as the color guard appeared in their bright satin uniforms, an American flag held high.

The sound of the band shot goose bumps up Molly’s spine; she peered out over the curb just as a formation of five motorcycle police roared into view in a chorus of sirens and gleaming metal.

She saw his car, a long black Cadillac convertible, flags snapping smartly off the hood. There in the back of the car, waving to the crowd stood John F. Kennedy.

A crescendo of applause and cheers erupted as a sea of people poured into the street to surround the open limousine. Molly ran with them. She thought Zed was still behind her, but in the crush, she wasn’t sure.

Kennedy turned from side to side, smiling broadly, touching adoring hands. The limousine inched closer, and Molly saw that she would be at the front of the crowd, her hand outstretched amidst a dozen hands, a pack of bodies pressing in from every side.

Then, before she knew it, everything changed.

Kennedy began to pivot away. Instead of looking directly at her, instead of reaching out to grasp her hand, Molly saw him about to turn toward the opposite side of the crowd. He would pass where she stood with his back turned! How could she have come this far only to see him turn away?

From somewhere above her she heard Zed’s loud whistle and then his voice, carried over the motorcycle engines and the din of cheers and applause. "Hey, Jack!" he shouted in a casual yet commanding tone, as though they were friends.

Hearing his name called this way, Kennedy swiveled around, the famous features gazing directly down, his jovial, dancing eyes meeting Molly’s own.

He smiled then. He reached out, grabbed her hand and shook it hard.

Nice to see you, JFK said. How ’ya doing?

"I love you," Molly whispered, although she knew he could not hear.

In the summer of 1959, Jack Masterson and his mother Edna were leaving Ohio for a new life in southern California. His Aunt Alma had just opened a dry cleaning store next to a House of Pies and she’d offered her sister a job and a place to stay.

For the trip west, Jack’s mother sold everything they owned except her photo albums and scrapbooks, summer clothes and her sterling silver. She called the profits seed money and made an elaborate game of taking Jack to all the big stores in Ashtabula so he could buy something special for the journey.

What he picked was a transistor radio, small enough to fit in the palm of his hand, with a real leather carrying case and an earpiece that looked like a hearing aid. Most nights, he fell asleep with it still playing in his ear.

They took the Continental Trailways bus, thirteen year-old Jack and his newly widowed mother, his transistor propped against the window for better reception, carried on a buoyant tide of talk shows and Top 40, strange new towns, one after another, each new set of radio call letters quickly left behind.

To save money, Jack’s mother brought along a picnic cooler of fried chicken and peanut butter sandwiches. Three nights and two days he and his mother rode that bus, drinking nothing but Pepsi; their remaining possessions crammed into two old suitcases that looked like saxophone cases, luggage bought by Edna for her honeymoon in 1944. Jack’s father was a Sergeant in the Signal Corps when they met at the USO.

Diesel fumes mingled with fried chicken and oranges, cigarette smoke and bathroom disinfectant. In their seats above the bus wheel, Jack’s mother read newspaper horoscopes. Pisces, that’s you, darlin’. ‘Don’t be afraid to start something new. Romance looks promising tonight.’

Edna let out her high musical laugh, elbowing him in the ribs. Taurus, that’s me: ‘Family members keep you busy. Bold new ventures spell success.’

His mother passed the miles reading movie magazines, Photoplays and Silver Screens filled with Liz Taylor, Debbie Reynolds and Eddie Fisher, their covers screaming:

LIZ’S SECRET NIGHTMARE!

DEBBIE TO LIZ: TAKE HIM. HE’S YOURS!

Sometimes Edna read aloud from the HAMMOND’S PICTORIAL TRAVEL ATLAS she’d bought at a church sale to make the trip more educational for Jack.

Springfield, Illinois, ‘home of Abraham Lincoln’. She made sure Jack was looking out the bus window when they sped past that historic marker. ‘In 1837,’ she read, ‘Honest Abe arrived in Springfield on the back of a borrowed horse, all his earthly possessions packed in two saddlebags.’ Honey, that’s just like us!

They made a game of such coincidences, like hearing a special song on the radio or spotting a particular license plate. Now and then, to lift their spirits, Jack and his mother invented good luck. If we see a red car in the next thirty seconds...

Beyond St. Louis, the Ozarks rose through walls of solid rock, geography suddenly unlike the familiar Midwest. To his mother’s great regret, they passed through her home state of Oklahoma in the middle of the night. Before his father died, she used to clean house in her pedal pushers every Saturday afternoon, dancing around the living room with a dust rag in her hand, the phonograph blasting Oklahoma!, her lush black hair tied up in a scarf, laughing through her movie star’s red lipstick smile. She hadn’t laughed like that in a long time.

They slept in fits and starts, the lights of the highway punctuating dreams. Sometimes Jack woke up in the middle of the night in the spooky dark of the bus with no one else awake besides the driver and for a minute, he didn’t know where he was. In the morning, his mother showed him all they had missed in the atlas. Oil derricks in front of the State Capitol, buffalo roaming the wildlife refuge, a breathless description of the shimmering Tulsa skyline. By then, they were already speeding across the Texas panhandle, and Jack was picking up Amarillo on his radio.

Crossing the border into New Mexico, the huge flat plains of Texas became rolling sagebrush hills. Even the light seemed suddenly different, sky the deepest shade of blue, clouds so huge they looked like painted scenery. Outside Albuquerque, the bus pulled into a roadside café and his mother said it was all right, just this once, for them to eat at a restaurant.

Jack bounded off the bus to kneel at the edge of the parking lot, scooping up a handful of flaming earth that was still warm to the touch, its color unlike the ground in Ohio where he and Edna lived with his grandparents after his dad died, or even Nebraska where they’d lived when he was alive. The color of this earth was like Mars. Jack whipped off his sneakers and socks and poured a handful of it into a sock. Edna smiled. In your sock? Now what are you going to do with that?

Add it to my dirt collection!

Edna laughed, but she let him keep it. She didn’t know he had another just like it, filled with a scoop of yard from their house in Nebraska and even a handful of soil taken behind his grandparents’ barn, though Ohio was a place he’d never liked.

Soon after the sun went down, somewhere west of Flagstaff, Jack’s transistor picked up its first fleeting California station. California! Advertisements, call letters, town names, all of it blending in oddness and novelty, signposts pointing the way to that grander unknown waiting beyond the desert.

He stumbled upon his first L.A. station by accident, scanning the dial, hoping to find just one more song before having to put the radio down for the night. Suddenly there it was. Fifty Thousand Watts! Your Tower of Power! The deejay’s voice resounded through echo chambers of trumpets and kazoos. Just before the reception crackled and danced away, the first strains of Bobby Darin’s Mack the Knife beckoned him to LA.

The bus pulled into Los Angeles while it was still dark. Jack and his mother stumbling groggily into the cool night air, her voice young and hopeful. California! Oh, sweetheart, now we’re home.

His Aunt Alma emerged from the waiting room.

My baby sister, she cried. Her voice had a husky, smoke-laced quality. Jack was surprised to see she was blonde; his mother had jet black hair like his own. Alma wore hers in a teased up twisted bun. She was only four years older than Edna, but she looked older. Maybe it was her skin, not soft like his mother’s but tanned and a little leathery.

Edna and her sister hugged and kissed, stepping backward to study